The Unidentified (23 page)

My eyes started to sting, hurt and embarrassed tears, like red ants itching their way down my cheeks. I had trusted Ari with everything, including my password. I wanted to change my account settings immediately, to hide, to not feel this stupid and vulnerable.

“Who is he?” Harrison pointed to the picture.

“I don’t know.”

“This is the anonymous person you’ve been corresponding with, and you agreed to meet. What’s his name?”

“He never told me.” And for once I maybe understood why he hadn’t. He didn’t really trust me to keep his secrets.

Harrison made a deeply frustrated noise, and loaded Profile. He entered all the physical attributes he could make out from the poor quality photo. Light brown hair. Dark brown eyes. Athletic build. Final level. Mixed race/ ethnically ambiguous. Harrison kept tweaking with other settings, but there were still hundreds of matches and none of them him.

“He’s not there,” I said, more curious than anything.

Jeremy asked if he could try, and took control. Protecht didn’t brand him for nothing—apparently getting a young Crackhead to work for you wasn’t without its benefits.

Jeremy redefined the search parameters, systematically narrowed and widened alternatives to pull up new results.

When he changed AGE: FINAL LEVEL to AGE: GAME COMPLETE, a familiar face flashed on-screen. I held my breath involuntarily, but Harrison picked up on it.

“Go back,” he barked. And Jeremy pulled up the details.

The picture didn’t really look much like him. He looked fresh-faced and innocent. Instead of the dread mullet, his hair was close-cropped. It was only the grin that gave him away. He should trademark that dimple.

“That’s him, isn’t it?” Jeremy said, pointing to one of the surveillance screens that was playing back the footage of the War Game fight. “He’s the one who ruined the War Game.”

I didn’t answer. I just watched the replay of the fight. It looked like a horribly choreographed dance without the sound. So unreal at this distance.

“Brenton Kant. Completed the Game two years ago with high scores. He’s nineteen.” Harrison read off the stats. “Lives in Center City. Employed by Zeronet.”

“I didn’t know,” I mumbled.

“Why are you protecting him?” Swift said angrily. “After what he did to Mikey?”

Harrison put a hand on Jeremy’s shoulder, then spoke softly to me. “You know, your friend Mikey could get into a lot of trouble for all of this. I’m afraid Mr. Littleton has a record, a rather serious record, and more than enough suspicious activity to build a case against him if someone has information they’re not sharing with us.” He turned me toward the screen again. “This Brenton Kant character is dangerous. Anyone who bypasses the age-restriction security sounds like a predator to me. Are you afraid of him, honey?”

“I don’t know,” I said again, trying to figure out why all this was happening or what to believe. “But I know Mikey wasn’t involved in any of that.”

“I’m sorry, Ms. Dade. If that’s all you
know
, there’s not much we can do to help your friend.”

I looked at Brenton Kant’s Profile again. Why did he drag Mikey into whatever he had planned?

It wasn’t that I couldn’t be trusted, or that I was loyal to my brand. I just…I had no reason to protect someone who would hurt Mikey.

“He’s planning something,” I said, staring at Brenton Kant’s clean-cut Profile pic on the screen. “He called it a pariah virus.”

Harrison and Jeremy launched into action.

“We need to scan the system immediately,” Harrison said. “Alert the administrators that we’re going to need to renegotiate terms with Network Inc. We’ll need increased resources to combat this threat…”

I went to find Tesla in the DIY Deopt.

“Is your offer still valid?” I asked her. “Can I get a ride?”

“Yeah, of course,” she said, clearing away her project.

“Are all those heartthrobs?” She had a box full of electronics by her workspace.

“Um, yes. I get a little obsessed with mind-numbing tasks when I’m stressed. All that labor-intensive busywork keeps me sane.”

We were heading toward the exit when she asked, “So…you talked to Ari?”

“I talked to her. She didn’t really say much back to me.”

“Strange. She had a lot to say
about
you on Friday night,” Tesla said sarcastically.

We logged out of the Game and I imagined Ari and Rocket and the other Craftsters last Friday night playing their Truth-or-Dares. Leaving nasty comments on that
Rate
It!
entry. Logging into my Network page and reading my conversation with Mikey. Seeing the coordinates mail from Brenton Kant and waiting for me there, spying.

Laughing the whole time. The “Last Laugh.”

Once we were safe inside Tesla’s car, I said, “She sure had a lot to say to Protecht, too.”

“What?”

I told Tesla about how she gave my password to Protecht.

“Have you ever heard of a pariah virus?”

“I don’t think so. What’s its damage?”

“It sends out all the stuff you say about people behind their backs to the people on your contact list. Stuff that’s supposed to be private. It’s basically an automated Ari, I guess.”

Tesla frowned. “I’ve never heard of any malware that could do that. That kind of destruction would require precision coding. I doubt even Jeremy Swift could code that. Where did you hear about it?”

“Rumors,” I answered evasively. I wasn’t proud of leaking the news to Protecht, and still felt like I owed it to the Unidentified to protect my sources.

“Um, I don’t mean to alarm you,” Tesla said, looking at her rearview mirrors again. “But I’m pretty sure we’re being followed.”

I looked back and saw someone turning onto the residential road behind us. “Seriously?”

“I noticed it parked outside the Game. And there it is.”

We were getting close to Mikey’s already.

“Keep driving,” I said.

“Oh, really? I usually pull over and drape myself seductively over the hood of my car when I’m getting tailed by creepy strangers,” she said a little hysterically.

I twisted in my seat to get a better look. A familiar car was behind us. A car that had been idling in my driveway after my friends had ditched me at After Hours. “I know who it is,” I said.

She relaxed her grip on the steering wheel a bit. “A friend of yours?”

friend of yours?”

“Not exactly. I kind of just revealed her boyfriend’s identity to Protecht. So probably not.”

We pulled into Mikey’s driveway, and Cayenne’s car rolled to a stop across the street.

Cayenne got out, and looked down the street.

“Why are you following me?” I called out.

“Come on. You should be used to it by now.”

Yeah, I’d been followed before. By Protecht, by my mom, by Ari. All the kids at school watching my stream. All the sponsors never leaving me alone. It didn’t mean I was used to it. “What do you want?”

“What’s going on?” Tesla asked.

Cayenne looked at her, then said to me. “I need to talk to you.
Privately.”

I couldn’t imagine what Cayenne Lewis had to say to me. Especially since the last time I’d seen her in the prison warden’s office, she barely even glanced my way.

“Why? I thought you said you were going to pretend I didn’t exist?” I shot back.

“I heard your friends are already doing that,” she answered. “It’s almost trendy now, so…hi.”

“Trendy. Right.” I slammed the car door. “Not like
your
friends.” I turned toward Mikey’s house. “Sorry, I didn’t buy the T-shirt, but I can’t support an organization that smashes my best friend’s face.”

“Wait,” she said.

I stopped.

“I don’t know who else to talk to,” Cayenne said.

I turned to Tesla. “Can you go tell Mikey I’ll be right in?”

Tesla looked at the two of us, shrugged, and went up the path to Mikey’s front door.

“What is it?”

“We didn’t know,” Cayenne said, watching Tesla disappear into the front of Mikey’s house. “He didn’t say anything about starting a fight, won’t say why he did it.”

“You mean Brenton Kant?” It felt good to see her flinch a little when I said his name.

“No offense, but I don’t get why Kant is so interested in you,” she said.

“He’s…what?”

“I’ve asked him why, but he doesn’t say. He’s keeping secrets from us.”

I looked at her. She was so pretty up close.

“Aren’t you two, like, linked? Isn’t he your boyfriend?”

Her eyebrows flew together. “That’s not what this is about.”

“Well, what is it about?”

“I was hoping you could tell me!” she shouted. “Forget it.”

She turned away, opened her car door, and got in. But she hesitated instead of slamming the door behind her.

“I’ve gotten into situations by trusting people before,”

she said, staring at the asphalt. “I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.”

I felt a knife-stab thinking of Ari.

She looked at me. “I don’t like being suspicious of my friends, but I hate that I don’t understand what his plans are.

If you knew something, I hoped you would tell me.”

“Why should I trust you?”

“You shouldn’t.”

“I should get punched in the face more often,” Mikey said, his voice muffled through my hug. “Split and swollen lips make me irresistible to women.”

“Shut up,” I mumbled into his neck, but let go when I realized his ribs were still sore, and remembered we weren’t alone.

Tesla was leaning against Mikey’s parts-cluttered desk, instinctively sorting screws and tools into piles.

Mikey’s room resembled the JunkYard in so many unfortunate ways.

“What did she want?” she asked me.

“Answers,” I said, clearing a spot beside Mikey on his bed. “She told me that Kant guy isn’t telling anyone why he jumped you at the War Game.”

“Could it be because he’s vred?” Mikey said, picking up his controller and pounding the button like it had insulted his grandmother.

“She seemed to think there was something more to it than that,” I mumbled, watching Mikey blast zombie mobs on-screen. “Did they say how long they’re going to keep your game on pause?”

Mikey shrugged. “Probably until they find enough evidence to give me Game Over.”

“Don’t say that.”

“We’re underage,” he argued. “They’re just going to take whatever details they find as proof of our moral take whatever details they find as proof of our moral degeneration.”

“No kidding. When walking down the street is breaking the law, surprise, surprise, we’re all criminals,” Tesla added. Then she frowned. “What are we listening to?”

Mikey was playing an old copy of the bird-wings track on the sound system. He didn’t have the updated version I’d cut in the Studio today.

“A skeleton of a song,” Mikey said. “The backbone beat.”

“No. I mean, you had to give your notebook(r) back.

You can’t be streaming this from Network, right?”

Mikey concentrated harder on the game he was playing, pretending he didn’t hear the question. It was what he did when he was guilty of something.

“Mikey, what did you do?”

He glanced at me sideways. “It was just an experiment.”

“What?”

“At the Illegal Arts Workshop, after you left, they mentioned blind spots—these gaps where networks connect like digital synapses. Structures the systems don’t notice because the information just makes the leap, but you could theoretically stuff data there…kind of concealed in the blind spot.”

I wasn’t following what he was saying, but Tesla looked intensely interested. “And?” she urged.

“And I played around with putting the theory into practice. I cached our songs in the cracks. They’re hidden if you’re not looking for them, but open access for anyone you’re not looking for them, but open access for anyone who knows where to find them.”

“Show me,” Tesla said, handing Mikey her notebook(r). But I was upset. This was just the kind of excuse Protecht and the administrators were looking for to give Mikey Game Over.

Protecht had issued a warning about the pariah virus on all channels of communication. All the screens were advising against even doing research on Archive. And the influx of intouch(r) announcements were particularly annoying:

#spons:
unauthorized programs more dangerous than ever. don’t get infected, stay Protechted.

The hysteria quickly rose to critical levels with the It Listers fanning the flames of the rumor riots.

“I heard everyone is already infected, just that Protecht hasn’t been able to detect it,” Palmer Phillips was telling Abe.

“Maybe
you
are,” Abe shot back. “It’s like a social disease and you’re a man slut.” Palmer punched him in the arm. It was how Team Players punctuate their sentences.

“I can’t even imagine what would happen if all my correspondences with Elan became public,” Echo Peters- son complained as her brand representative winked at her from across the VIP Lounge. She lowered her voice and whispered to Eva, “And think of what would happen if that thing you said about Quelly that one time got back to her?”

Eva glared at her. “I thought you said you deleted that?”

It sounded trivial and ridiculous, just like anything Fashion Fascists said, but having recently had all my private content revealed by a friend, I knew how much stuff like this could sting.

Tycho was sitting alone watching the frenzy feed itself. I wondered how it felt to know that you were the cause of so much anxiety.

My intouch(r) hummed for my attention. I checked it even though I had been only getting sponsor messages now that Ari was ignoring me and Mikey was still on pause.

toy321:
found something…suspicious @KID I put my intouch(r) away and noticed Tycho watching me.
Thank you,
he mouthed from across the room.

I logged out of the VIP Lounge, not really understanding what favors I’d done for Tycho lately, and went to find Tesla.

She was in the Arcade whispering with Elle.

“Hey, what’s going on?” I said, approaching the Tech Help desk. I noticed Elle had tears in her eyes. She took her glasses off to dry them quickly.